Journey : Splogging with a custom bot

Introduction and History

Its been a while since I gave up IM because I was making more passive income elsewhere. Its time to look again at splogging / autoblogging as a method to make some money. I know autoblogging can work as I have done it in the past. I found I can make it work if I use a custom written bot so that I can do things which other people can not do. I don't intend to make an income of this or grow it into a IM empire. I just want to make a bit of splash cash to spend on a few things online.



Previously, I was running a custom bot which was making about about $300-$500 on autopilot. While I thought this was passive income it really wasn't. My blogs were being updated automatically every day and were getting small amounts of traffic. The key to this was lots of sites making a small amount each. Each new website I created would add about $2-$3 a month to my passive income and I was running 140 blogs. But of course google hated what I was doing. Even though the big G hated it, I was still getting search engine traffic as the vast volume of blogs and posts allowed me to get some content ranked. I didn't do any other promotion.

The reason I gave up the blogs was that the content sources I was using were slow to remove copyright information from their sites. So inevitably I would also get hit with DCMA notices and threats of legal action. Dealing with all of the DCMA requests turned into a nightmare when you have up then of thousands of posts and I was spending an hour a day removing posts and replying to emails. I vowed to give up until I had a content source which I could use which would solve this problem.




Then the other day I found my content source. It was a light bulb moment where I just realised I had a solution to my content requirements. Of course I can't tell you what I am doing but I think it will work just fine for my autoblogging requirements.

So that brings us up to yesterday. Yesterday I got a couple of hours to write some code for my new content source and to write up a new autoblogging bot. I setup 1 blog to do some testing and ran the blogging manually a few times last night and today.

I do not care about google for this journey. I will be using twitter for promotion only and will only use 1 twitter account. I will not be following/unfollowing and will let it build up itself over time. I may bring in other social media sources into my promotion methods if I get time in the future to code something.



Where things are at now

So I have created 1 site and manually posted some content. I have 2 was to make money from the sites. The first is through traffic sharing / redirection. The second is through advertisements. I can not use google adsense as my content is still regarded as duplicate content so I will steer clear of them. Instead I will use a smaller advertiser who won't be as harsh (ie don't care its an autoblog) on the sites.



The content will be based on content out there so it will definitely raise duplicate content flags on google but I really don't care if they are not my main source of traffic.

So every few hours I ran the bot manually to check the code and make sure it was working. In total I have 36 posts on the site now. They have been up for less then 24 hours and it has made a whole total of $0.03 . Yep 3 whole cents.

Assets and Earnings

I'll keep track of two things. Earnings and total blogs. Earnings are obviously important as its the cash I can spend. Blogs show how much work I am putting into the journey each week.

Blogs: 1
Earnings 31st March: $0.03


Challanges not Goals

People like to set goals. They set short term goals, target goals, long term goals, goals for today, goals for this week and goals for this year. The problem with goals is they are lofty things and lots of people don't actually set CLEAR goals with a path to achieve that goal.

I have the same problem. I know where I want to be and I can say I want to make $X a day but I haven't really set a path to achieve those goals. What I do know is if I create blogs and I schedule them to post a few times each way I will make money. It might not be a lot of money but each blog will make some money. Ok so what if I set a goal to create X blogs a week ? I will probably not do it as a goal is something I want to achieve and not something I need to achieve.

Instead I will focus on CHALLENGES.



So each time I venture back to this Journey I will set myself a challenge. That challenge may or may not have a date on when to achieve it. But by setting the challenge I am hoping I will have some more ownership over what I need to do. The challenge will always put me a step closer to earning more money.

So lets get going with the first challenge.

Challenge 1

Challenge 1 is a simple task. It is to take my manual post method and set it up to post continuously all day long. I think it should post once each hour which makes 24 posts a day. That may be a bit high but I don't want to push too much out there to start of with on a new blog.





OK that should do for now. I'll go get that setup and stop back to issue a new challenge when it is done.

will follow this very closely

Challenge 1 - COMPLETED

I have setup the scheduled posts to happen every hour. That means I should get 24 posts out there every day going forward.

Challenge 2 - DCMA Cleanup Process

I need to setup my automatic cleanup process. The way this works is pretty easy. The content suppliers may get a DCMA notice. If that happens their site will remove the content. I will monitor the content and remove my content at the same time. While this doesn't mean I will not get any DCMA notices it should easily allow me to remove th content. The great thing is that the content source publishes the DCMA notices it has addressed so its very easy to monitor.

I expect this will take maybe an hour to code from scratch.

Good luck, definetly following.
I always love autoblogging journeys. I even tried it on my own, but I did not put as much effort like you. You clearly know what you are doing

kamilari said:

will follow this very closely

Click to expand...

thanks

fullwall3t said:

Good luck, definetly following.
I always love autoblogging journeys. I even tried it on my own, but I did not put as much effort like you. You clearly know what you are doing

Click to expand...

Thanks. autoblogging is actually hard work up front and then it should be no work at all except collecting the money.

Challenge 2 - COMPLETED

The DCMA cleanup is pretty much done for identifying the posts to remove. There was already one post which needed to be removed. At the moment it will be a manual thing until I see how much work this is going to be. If it turns out to be more than 1-2 links a day I will automate the deletion of the posts as well but right now its close enough for what I need.




Challenge 3 - Change Code to handle Multiple (ie hundreds) blogs

To get this going quickly I put in some things which are less then elegant. I need to store my autoblog information in a table (using mariaDB) and then have my program use that table to identify which blogs to load content onto. This will mean adding a last update time to the program so it picks the blogs which haven't been updated for the longest period. Rough estimate is 30 mins to 1 hour of coding and testing.

Other tasks/challenges to come
Other things to do in the future (might be future challenges for me):
- Automate removal of posts (continued on from challenge 2)
- Setup site 2
- other promotion methods to be researched


The Hourly Rate
The ROI on this project is going to be interesting. I am using free resources for the start of this trial so every cent is profit. I used free resources during my last autoblogging adventure with no issues. But I am putting time into the project so I will record how long I spend on the project and work out my hourly rate. The idea is it will have a low hourly rate for the first few months/year and then it will increase as the earnings increase and I put less effort into it. Think of it like writing a kindle book. If you self-author hen you might spend 20 hours on the book. After a month you may have made $20 (so hourly rate of $1), after 6 months $200 (Hourly rate is now $10) and after a year $2000 (Hourly rate is now $100). Because its an income stream the hourly rate for your efforts will just continue to rise (but will eventually slow down).

As at 31st March:
To anyone else in a journey I wish you the best of luck in earnings.

Challenge 3 - COMPLETED

Setup the table and entered the details for the one blog I am running. Added all the necessary code to pick the right blog to run and source the right content source for each blog.

Challenge 4 - Setup Blog 2

I won't be doing this today but its the next task on my list so I can get two blogs up and running with no issues. I need to do some keyword research and create the blog. The blog creation process I should automate (at least partly) at some point.




===============================================================



Other tasks/challenges to come
Other things to do in the future (might be future challenges for me):
- Automate removal of posts (continued on from challenge 2)
- other promotion methods to be researched
- Automate blog creation process
- Setup site 3

The Hourly Rate
The ROI on this project is going to be interesting. I am using free resources for the start of this trial so every cent is profit. I used free resources during my last autoblogging adventure with no issues. But I am putting time into the project so I will record how long I spend on the project and work out my hourly rate. The idea is it will have a low hourly rate for the first few months/year and then it will increase as the earnings increase and I put less effort into it. Think of it like writing a kindle book. If you self-author hen you might spend 20 hours on the book. After a month you may have made $20 (so hourly rate of $1), after 6 months $200 (Hourly rate is now $10) and after a year $2000 (Hourly rate is now $100). Because its an income stream the hourly rate for your efforts will just continue to rise (but will eventually slow down).

As at 31st March for Earnings / 1st April for Hours:

• Hours spent on project : 3 hours
• Profit : $0.03
• Hourly Rate : $0.01

To anyone else in a journey I wish you the best of luck in earnings.

Challenge 4 - COMPLETED

Made a site this morning. Took me about 15 mins to setup (mostly keyword identification) and 15 mins to do some testing with it. All the automation seems to work well and its posting to both sites with no issues.

Challenge 4 - Setup Blogs 3 -6

To get this trial going I really just need to be plowing through some sites. There are 2 things important to make money using autoblogs. The first is quantity. You need lots of blogs and lots of posts happening. 50-100 posts a day is not going to cut it with duplicate content. You need 2000+ posts a day to start to make anything. The second thing is time. Posts need to get out there and eventually some of it gets indexed and gets organic traffic. At 2000 posts per day for 365 days you can get out 730,000 posts a year. If only 0.01% of these get indexed you then have 7300 indexed pages for various long tail keywords. But at approx 50 posts a day at the moment I will only get 18250 posts per year. That is only 182 posts indexed a year. That will not cut it. So if it takes me 15 mins per site then I should be able to get up 4 sites in an hour which is sites 3,4,5,6.

Other tasks/challenges to come
Other things to do in the future (might be future challenges for me):
- Automate removal of posts (continued on from challenge 2)
- Other promotion methods to be researched
- Automate blog creation process
- Setup site 3

The Hourly Rate
The ROI on this project is going to be interesting. I am using free resources for the start of this trial so every cent is profit. I used free resources during my last autoblogging adventure with no issues. But I am putting time into the project so I will record how long I spend on the project and work out my hourly rate. The idea is it will have a low hourly rate for the first few months/year and then it will increase as the earnings increase and I put less effort into it. Think of it like writing a kindle book. If you self-author hen you might spend 20 hours on the book. After a month you may have made $20 (so hourly rate of $1), after 6 months $200 (Hourly rate is now $10) and after a year $2000 (Hourly rate is now $100). Because its an income stream the hourly rate for your efforts will just continue to rise (but will eventually slow down).

As at 31st March for Earnings / 2nd April for Hours:

• Hours spent on project : 3.5 hours
• Profit : $0.03
• Hourly Rate : $0.0085

To anyone else in a journey I wish you the best of luck in earnings.

Challenge 5 - COMPLETED

Created 4 sites today. Took a little less then an hour to do and I spread it out in between other things. I will slow down from here as I now have 6 blogs posting 24 posts a day for a total of 144 posts per day. I want to get an idea of how this content works and work out what it will earn by itself. I know it as least can make a few cents.

Challenge 6 - Setup Blogs 7 and 8

I don't want to completely stop creating blogs just yet. I will knock out one or two blogs for the next few days as the more I create the more I can see any potential rather then leaving it to chance.



Other tasks/challenges to come
Other things to do in the future (might be future challenges for me):
- Automate removal of posts (continued on from challenge 2)
- Other promotion methods to be researched
- Automate blog creation process
- Setup site 9+

The Hourly Rate
The ROI on this project is going to be interesting. I am using free resources for the start of this trial so every cent is profit. I used free resources during my last autoblogging adventure with no issues. But I am putting time into the project so I will record how long I spend on the project and work out my hourly rate. The idea is it will have a low hourly rate for the first few months/year and then it will increase as the earnings increase and I put less effort into it. Think of it like writing a kindle book. If you self-author hen you might spend 20 hours on the book. After a month you may have made $20 (so hourly rate of $1), after 6 months $200 (Hourly rate is now $10) and after a year $2000 (Hourly rate is now $100). Because its an income stream the hourly rate for your efforts will just continue to rise (but will eventually slow down).

As at 31st March for Earnings / 2nd April for Hours:

• Hours spent on project : 4.5 hours
• Profit : $0.03
• Hourly Rate : $0.0066

To anyone else in a journey I wish you the best of luck in earnings.

Challenge 6 - COMPLETED

Created another 2 sites. (Blogs 7 and 8). 8 Sites up and running now which was a pretty good effort today. Its getting quicker to create each site as I get into the flow of it but I should go automate it so its even quicker. I haven't done that yet as its a bit of work to do and get it right with multiple sites to connect to setup the blog and put advertising on it. For now I will keep it manual. Even if I do 1-2 a day on average that will be a large number of blogs running in the next few months.

Challenge 7 - Setup Blogs 9 and 10

Keep pushing through and creating blogs. Its the main thing to do now so that the money slowly increases. Even 10 auto blogs will being in pennies a day. I need to get to 150 - 200 blogs before I start to see some improvements in earnings.

Back to 1c per hour earned

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Other tasks/challenges to come
Other things to do in the future (might be future challenges for me):
- Automate removal of posts (continued on from challenge 2)
- Other promotion methods to be researched
- Automate blog creation process
- Setup site 9+

The Hourly Rate
The ROI on this project is going to be interesting. I am using free resources for the start of this trial so every cent is profit. I used free resources during my last autoblogging adventure with no issues. But I am putting time into the project so I will record how long I spend on the project and work out my hourly rate. The idea is it will have a low hourly rate for the first few months/year and then it will increase as the earnings increase and I put less effort into it. Think of it like writing a kindle book. If you self-author hen you might spend 20 hours on the book. After a month you may have made $20 (so hourly rate of $1), after 6 months $200 (Hourly rate is now $10) and after a year $2000 (Hourly rate is now $100). Because its an income stream the hourly rate for your efforts will just continue to rise (but will eventually slow down).

As at 1st April for Earnings / 2nd April for Hours:

• Hours spent on project : 5 hours
• Profit : $0.05
• Hourly Rate : $0.01

To anyone else in a journey I wish you the best of luck in earnings.

which is your main traffic source

Following this unique journey

kamilari said:

which is your main traffic source

Click to expand...

For now it is Twitter because that is the easiest to automate in a custom bot. I will use other sources later.

moviemoney said:

Following this unique journey

Click to expand...

Thanks for following.

=======================

I don't have much to update right now. Earnings have come in and I made a few more cents. I'll try and finish my challenge later today and put in another post with the updated figures.

An update:

Created Blog 9 today but will do blog 10 tomorrow.

Twitter locked my account obviously going from no tweets back to around 190 tweets in a day flagged the account. Thats ok, I just had to login and verify the phone number.
But I hadn't noticed it earlier so no tweets for the last 14 hours.

Considering I made a few cents yesterday before it was locked so I am hopeful we are slowly increasing the earnings per day. I'll make blog 10 tomorrow and then give it a week or so and only increase 1 blog every few days. My Hourly pay has now increased above 1c again

I also noticed my internal SEO is less then perfect. I should fix that up in the next few days.

===============================================================
Other tasks/challenges to come
Other things to do in the future (might be future challenges for me):
- Automate removal of posts (continued on from challenge 2)
- Other promotion methods to be researched
- Automate blog creation process
- Setup site 9+
- Fix internal SEO linking as its less then perfect.

The Hourly Rate
The ROI on this project is going to be interesting. I am using free resources for the start of this trial so every cent is profit. I used free resources during my last autoblogging adventure with no issues. But I am putting time into the project so I will record how long I spend on the project and work out my hourly rate. The idea is it will have a low hourly rate for the first few months/year and then it will increase as the earnings increase and I put less effort into it. Think of it like writing a kindle book. If you self-author hen you might spend 20 hours on the book. After a month you may have made $20 (so hourly rate of $1), after 6 months $200 (Hourly rate is now $10) and after a year $2000 (Hourly rate is now $100). Because its an income stream the hourly rate for your efforts will just continue to rise (but will eventually slow down).

As at 2nd April for Earnings / 3rd April for Hours:

• Hours spent on project : 5.5 hours
• Profit : $0.08
• Hourly Rate : $0.0145

To anyone else in a journey I wish you the best of luck in earnings.

Done nothing today so far. I will look at completing the challenge tomorrow.

The earnings are slowly increasing. Traffic increases are still minimal at the moment and won't increase too much till I start to create more blogs. I have gone from earning about 30c in a month to $1.50 small scale at the moment. 3 of the blogs so far have earned nothing. The problem with autoblogging is you need to get a lot of pages out there and a lot of links in order to see good traffic and that takes time. The good thing with autoblogging is you don't need to create content or links. You just need to leave the computer on and let it do its work.

===============================================================
Other tasks/challenges to come
Other things to do in the future (might be future challenges for me):
- Automate removal of posts (continued on from challenge 2)
- Other promotion methods to be researched
- Automate blog creation process
- Setup site 9+
- Fix internal SEO linking as its less then perfect.

The Hourly Rate
The ROI on this project is going to be interesting. I am using free resources for the start of this trial so every cent is profit. I used free resources during my last autoblogging adventure with no issues. But I am putting time into the project so I will record how long I spend on the project and work out my hourly rate. The idea is it will have a low hourly rate for the first few months/year and then it will increase as the earnings increase and I put less effort into it. Think of it like writing a kindle book. If you self-author hen you might spend 20 hours on the book. After a month you may have made $20 (so hourly rate of $1), after 6 months $200 (Hourly rate is now $10) and after a year $2000 (Hourly rate is now $100). Because its an income stream the hourly rate for your efforts will just continue to rise (but will eventually slow down).

As at 3rd April for Earnings / 4th April for Hours:

• Hours spent on project : 5.5 hours
• Profit : $0.13
• Hourly Rate : $0.023

To anyone else in a journey I wish you the best of luck in earnings.

Very good journey buddy. I want to follow your success

danko6 said:

Very good journey buddy. I want to follow your success

Click to expand...

lol. I wouldn't call 0.13 a success

The success is in not giving up. good luck and I am following.

I read everything in this thread, very good information and thanks sooo much to share your journey with us!

I am following other 2 sblog journey at this time:

https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/splogging-in-2018.998322/page-3#post-10926083
https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/j...y-till-july-2018.1013796/page-3#post-10926091

Though it seems one of them is dead lol, OP didnt update for a long time, damn it.

I am very interesting with sblog, and I will do similar thing in the next couple of month, thats why I feel so good and comfortable to read a sblog journey at here.

I got some questions though:

1, What platform you use? You said 0 cost, so must be some web2.0 like wordpress or blogger right?
2, What ad network you use? CPA or CPC, so the platform u are using(web2.0) allow put such code on web2.0?

A big difference I can see between u and other sblog journey is, they are using spin related method to make contents more unique, while u are still using old method, duplicate contents, lets watch your progress!


Thanks for share this valuable experience, to us.

terrycody said:

1, What platform you use? You said 0 cost, so must be some web2.0 like wordpress or blogger right?
2, What ad network you use? CPA or CPC, so the platform u are using(web2.0) allow put such code on web2.0?

Click to expand...

1. Yes its a non-common web 2.0 based on wordpress wpmu. I prefer not to say as I don't want the competition.
2. PPC/CPC. Because its a non-common Web 2.0 there is no issue putting the ads on there.